


Reruns All Become Our History

by Epigone



Category: Sports Night
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, college basketball
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-15
Updated: 2007-03-15
Packaged: 2017-10-12 23:50:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/130516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Epigone/pseuds/Epigone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>And he wants to say, I can watch college basketball anywhere, so why should I miss it?  The only time I miss anything is when I watch you on tape every morning over breakfast.  You, frozen in onscreen stasis at thirty-six (at thirty-two, when I left you; at eighteen, when Sam did).</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reruns All Become Our History

**Author's Note:**

> **Rating and Warnings** : PG. Spoilers for series finale.  
>  **Disclaimer** : They're Aaron Sorkin's, and he can keep 'em. I just borrow.  
>  **Acknowledgments and Notes** : Thanks to Hiyacynth and Abyssinia, as always, for betas and title/epigraph consultations. Title from the Goo Goo Dolls' "Name"; a couple of lines from Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." Written for [the Putting the Sports Back in Sports Night](http://www.livejournal.com/users/sportsbackinsn) ficathon off the following college-basketball prompt: "Three ACC teams make the Women's Basketball Final Four, and Brenda Frese and Maryland win their first title." The Terps pretty much own my immortal soul, so thank you, thank you to minervacat for organizing this whole shebang, and letting me (and Dan) talk about these women.
> 
> * * *

_Ever since I've known you you've walked that walk  
You've broken all the records  
Now you've broken all the clocks, all the clocks  
And every time it breaks my heart to hear you talking this way._  
\--Patty Griffin, "You Never Get What You Want"  


The peal of the phone startles them both, but it's Julia who shrugs off the comforter, sits up, and answers it. Casey stays burrowed down in the blankets, still clinging to the edge of sleep like a swimmer half-emerged from the sea. He moves farther into the radius of her warm body.

"I'm sorry?" says Julia. Casey slings one arm over her waist and holds her loosely, his head against her hip, his face in the mattress. "Oh. It's for you, Case, he's singing"—and Casey finds the cold phone slipped between his ear and shoulder as Julia slides back under the covers.

"Wha?" he asks into the mattress. He can hear Dan's voice on the other end, muffled, as if he's not close enough to the receiver. He _is_ singing; it sounds like the chorus to "Mr. Tambourine Man." Casey clears his throat and growls, "If you ever jingle-jangle my morning this early again, I'll… do something really terrible to your face."

Dan gets closer to the phone and says, "Not my face, please; I'd never work again." He laughs and says, "Sorry, they never play that song on the radio any more, and I got excited."

Casey opens his eyes for the first time and pokes his head outside of the blankets. Julia's back is to him, but her breathing tells him she's asleep again. She can do that, slip in and out of sleep as casually and gracefully as putting on a coat. He doesn't envy her it. Some of his favorite times are those nights when he lies waiting for his eyes to close, watching her dim body rippled with moonlight from the window, knowing Charlie's asleep in the next room.

"It's six a.m.," says Casey. "What're you doing up, Danny?"

"I haven't been to bed yet," replies Dan enthusiastically.

"What're you still doing up, Danny?"

There's a second of dead air. " _Casey_. You didn't see the game last night."

Casey grimaces. "I'm old. I work nine to five on Tuesdays. I turned in about halfway through the second half, and Duke was way ahead."

"So you don't even know! Casey! Casey, Casey, Casey."

"You keep saying it like that, it starts sounding like a dog's name."

"I have news for you, my friend: it _is_ a dog's name. Casey, _Maryland_ won. Listen: there are six seconds left in the game, the Terps have been trailing almost all night, and Toliver sinks a—"

"Hang on," interrupts Casey, dropping his head onto the pillow. "I want to hear your in-depth recap, I really do, but it's six a.m. Okay? And Julia's trying to sleep. Can I call you back sometime this afternoon?"

"You bet you wanna hear my recap," says Dan. "It's pretty good. Some people even think I should get paid for this stuff." He pauses. "Yeah, sorry, it's early. We stayed late covering overtime, and then we went to Anthony's, and then it was just… six a.m. in my apartment and I was still awake, you know? I was actually calling because I was going to run out for lunch this afternoon, and I wondered if you wanted to meet up. You know, what with your Wednesdays-off bigshot-journalist schedule these days."

"Oh." Casey regards the phone for a moment, considering. He hasn't hung out with Dan in a couple of weeks. Three, to be exact; the last time was at an uptown bar where they both got tipsy and Dan might've gone home with a med student. These days Casey sees Dan on television more than he really sees him. Sometimes, in between drinks or lunches or parties thrown by mutual friends, Casey almost forgets the off-air Dan—the one who doesn't smile quite so convincingly, who isn't always professionally lit, who doesn't have all the right words scripted for him.

Into Casey's silence, Dan says, "Oh, do you—did you guys already have plans today? I could take a rain check."

"No, no," says Casey. "I just drifted off for a second. I'd like lunch."

"Is Charlie on spring break yet? You wanna bring him along?"

Casey grins. Charlie loves Dan. He never quite forgave Casey for leaving television, but bragging about My Dad's Friend Dan Rydell has apparently made him one of the most popular freshmen in school.

"Yeah, he'd love to come," says Casey. "I'll give you a call later and we can work stuff out. And hey, Danny?"

"Yeah?"

"Go to bed for an hour or two. Sleep it off."

"I didn't have that much to drink!" protests Dan, but he's laughing. "I'm not that bad a role model, am I?"

"No, you're not," says Casey, leaning his head against the headboard and closing his eyes again. "Don't worry. I wouldn't've even noticed if it weren't for the singing."

"I only sing when I'm mildly inebriated?"

"You only sing _well_ when you're mildly inebriated," rejoins Casey. "I'll see you later, man."

He leans over Julia to hang up the phone, and she stirs drowsily, kissing his outstretched arm. He squeezes his other arm more tightly around her and buries his face in the soapy scent of her bare back, between her shoulder blades.

She exhales a long breath and murmurs, "What was Dan singing for?"

"Maryland's women won the NCAA tournament."

"Sounded pretty happy, huh?"

"Honestly?" says Casey, into the smoothness of her skin, the ridge of her spine, the groove of his life. "I have no idea."

***

Dan wants to eat at an Indonesian place he's been raving about for months, but for Charlie's sake they go to Subway instead. Charlie wants to make the JV wrestling squad next semester, and so he's "watching his weight," which was what Lisa used to say in the old days. It makes Casey uneasy, this echo, but he gets it; he worked long enough in sports to understand the sacrifices you make.

Dan clearly doesn't. Dan's a snob about restaurants, but also for Charlie's sake, he doesn't say anything. He orders some kind of southwestern sub with a despairing look at Casey—a look that Casey easily reads as _I could be eating three-star kari ayam right now, you bastard_ —and two bottled drinks, a water and a Sprite.

"You don't like soda," observes Casey as they finish off their sandwiches. Dan's Sprite remains untouched.

"Coca-Cola's running some kind of prize campaign where if you get the right bottle cap, they give you a vacation to Jamaica. Or something."

"And so off the infinitesimal chance that you get it, you buy Sprites that you don't drink."

"Sometimes Mountain Dew," says Dan. "If I win it, I make back all my money and then some, right? For now, Charlie can have it."

" _Weight classes_ ," says Charlie darkly, and Dan gives Casey another despairing look.

Ten seconds later, Charlie catches sight of a group of girls he knows from school and drifts over to them, all smiles once again. Dan, watching, leans in toward Casey and hisses, "What is this? Hip teenagers go to Subway of their own volition? _People_ go to Subway of their own volition?"

"Mountain Dew isn't made by Coca-Cola," Casey says.

Dan's still following Charlie's awkward attempts at flirtation. After a moment, he says, "Those girls know he's got no taste. He hangs out in Subways. You've gotta help him, Casey, he's dying out there."

Casey isn't really listening. Most people talk their way around to things; Dan just talks around them, and sometimes it gets tedious. Casey leans back in his seat and watches Dan, thinking that he looks even younger than he did three weeks ago. He looks like the kid he was when they first met: painfully short hair, a little on the skinny side, a darkness about the eyes that comes from late nights and hangovers. He moves with the same manic, phosphorescent energy, too, which back then Casey chalked up to the usual college nerves.

Ten years later Casey found out that Sam had been dead less than a year when they met. That two days after Sam's funeral, Dan's mother had come upon Dan crying in his room, and had put a hand on his forehead and said, "Don't be sad, Daniel." He must expend a lot of energy, spending his life trying not to be.

Finally Dan looks at Casey and says, with an excess of cheer, "So you're still with Julia, huh?"

"Well, she answered my phone this morning," says Casey.

"So it's pretty serious?"

"As serious as it was the last time you asked."

"You guys going to tie the knot soon? How long's it been, two years?"

"Well, Dan," says Casey tightly, "I'm not exactly eager to be married again. And it'll be four years next month. You _know_ that—how can you—"

And then Casey stops, because it occurs to him: of course Dan hasn't forgotten. Next week it'll be four years since Casey left _Sports Night_ , and it was only a week after that when, on his first day at _The New York Times_ , a young managing editor cornered him at the coffee pot to tell him that _she_ 'd never watched _Sports Night_ but she certainly didn't think it qualified him to write this new regular column. Casey asked her out two days later.

"Sorry," says Dan. "Four years, you're right. I'm glad you guys are happy."

"It's okay." Casey takes a drink, just for something to do. "What about you? You dating anyone?" Dan smiles wryly and doesn't say anything. "Oh, come on, not even Bobbi?"

Dan gives him a pained look, and it hits Casey again, all at once, how right it is that Dan's on television—how good an anchor he is, how good an actor. Because when Dan gives you that look, you're never absolutely sure if he's really hurting or not.

"Leaving aside for a moment how weird it would be to date your replacement—it's Bobbi Bernstein. On good days I just manage to make eye contact with her." Casey raises an eyebrow, and Dan waves a hand and says, "Yeah, yeah, we have a great on-air rapport, we fake it till we make it. But seriously, Casey, Bobbi Bernstein. I'm always worried I'm going to, like, say something in Spanish and she'll take it the wrong way."

"It's a shame you don't get the chance to show off your vast Spanish vocabulary to her."

Dan looks indignant. "Well, I can't ever invite her to El Perro Fumando, can I? I can't ever assure her that 'mi casa es su casa.'"

"Pretty much the only reason you would ever need to say 'Mi casa es su casa' to Bobbi would be… if you were dating her."

"Luckily, I'm not," says Dan. "But it's okay. Really, Bobbi pales in comparison to many women. Many, many women. For example—an arbitrary example—Brenda Frese is hot."

"She just got married," Casey points out.

"I'm just saying, if she were to walk through that door right now and say, 'Daniel, I want you,' I would not break her heart. I'm not that guy." Dan turns and looks expectantly out toward the street.

No one comes in. The tourists trail past lugging shopping bags and suitcases, and after a moment the man at the corner table gets up and goes out, letting in a burst of April wind. Casey suddenly feels as lonely as he's ever been. He glances over at Charlie and the girls, thinking of going home, thinking of Julia sitting dangling her long legs off the kitchen counter, a novel in her lap. He's got a column to finish for tomorrow. He's got Charlie until tonight, when Lisa takes him back.

"You don't meet many college basketball coaches who look that good," Dan's saying. "I mean, it's not like I want to see Gary Williams naked, you know?"

Casey looks at him, dark and frenzied with his hands clasped around his unopened Sprite, and something moves in his chest. "Oh, I see. So in 2002, when the crowd starting streaming onto the floor of the Georgia Dome, you weren't the guy who stood on my desk and yelled, 'First team in twenty-three years to win it all without a McDonald's All-American! Gary, take me now!'"

Dan smiles sheepishly, dropping his head. He says, "I like winners."

"I know you do," replies Casey, quietly.

Dan glances up at him and says, "You're supposed to say, 'That's okay, Dan, _I_ like you.'"

"You know I like you," says Casey. He's had this conversation before; he knows it won't ever go anywhere. After a moment, he says, "Danny. Why'd you stay?"

"You mean after you gave up your job for me?" Dan's chair squeals as he pushes it a few inches farther from the table. He leans back, elbows on the top bar of the chair, and glares. "Gee, I dunno, let me count the reasons."

"I didn't give up my job for you. One of us needed to go. I went."

"They were trying to force me out; they wanted you to be the one to stay—"

"No, _you don't know that_ ," snaps Casey. "You have no idea how the network works. You are _clueless_."

Dan's mouth compresses in on itself, and this time Casey knows the hurt's real. Quo Vadimus probably had wanted Dan to go. A year after the takeover, _Sports Night_ passed Fox and peaked as the number-two sports show in the country. Two years after, the budget started running low, too low to keep two of TV's top anchors. Dan still wasn't polling as high as he deserved, but Casey thought that the most sensible—and really the most honorable—thing to do was leave first. The _Times_ offer had already been on the table for a month; and after all, his salary was sucking up more of QV's money anyway.

He said as much to Dan the night after he quit. Dan, sitting at the bar at Anthony's, very calmly ordered up a screwdriver and took a long gulp. Then he said, "Triteness aside, I hope you understand the semantic symbolism here," and just as calmly poured it down Casey's shirtfront.

"I know," says Casey now: "screw me."

"Seriously, screw you," says Dan, but without much heat. "I threw the drink in your face, okay. I wasn't going to throw the job in your face, too."

"You threw the drink at my chest," Casey says. "But I wasn't talking about that spring. I meant afterward. Any time in the four intervening years—Jesus, Danny, I know you've had offers."

Dan shrugs. "Jeremy stayed."

"So, what, it's Jeremy you're dating?" Dan doesn't dignify that with any more response than a snort. "Come on. Jeremy stayed because he was, at the time, an associate producer. Now he's a writer and a substitute anchor, and with that profile, any day he's gonna get snatched up by some place that'll give him his own show. And Natalie stayed because she knew she'd eventually make producer. They had places to rise to at _Sports Night_. You should've only stayed as long as it was fun. You never had anywhere better to go there."

"I never had anywhere better to go, period," says Dan, and Casey doesn't have anything left to say. Dan tilts his head back and looks at the dingy pockmarked ceiling above. After a while, he says abstractedly, to no one in particular, "You really didn't catch the end of the game last night, did you?" He looks down again, leans on the table. They're almost touching. "It was beautiful, Case, it really was."

His eyes are vague; his emotion, too, is somehow distant, without immediate focus. Casey wonders if, in the past few years, Dan has lost the ability to connect with anyone more specific than an unseen audience. He wonders if it's egotistic to blame himself—his leaving Dan to strangers and Bobbi Bernstein, around whom Dan tiptoes in two languages.

"So I hear," says Casey.

"I mean, I won't give you the famous in-depth recap, because if you wanted that you'd watch the show—"

"I _do_ watch the show, Danny, I tape—"

"—but it was just. It was what you wait for in sports. Maryland was trailing almost the whole game, had managed a one-point lead just twice. Toliver couldn't make a three-pointer to save her life. Five minutes into the second half Duke was up thirteen. Brenda's screaming, Coleman's been looking like she wants to throw up all night—and then Maryland rallies." Dan smiles. He puts a hand on Casey's arm. Casey looks at it, and feels it shaking, and lets it stay. "Coleman gets it to within one, they fight for six minutes over two- or three-point margins; Maryland comes out of a timeout three points behind; and with six seconds left in regulation Toliver sinks a three to tie. They won it on free throws in OT, but they _won_ it in that moment, six seconds from the buzzer: two freshmen, two sophomores, a junior, and a thirty-six-year-old coach."

Casey grins wryly, with half his mouth. "The rumors are true. You really should get paid for that."

"That's what I'm sayin'," says Dan. He grins back, and for a moment he's actually doing it at Casey. "That's why I stayed. I stayed for nights like that. Don't you miss watching that?"

Casey wants to say, I don't miss bars and takeout food almost every night. I don't miss talking to cameras instead of people. I don't miss getting off at midnight, keeping a collegiate schedule, taking women home at two a.m. to an apartment too big for a bachelor. And he wants to say, I can watch college basketball anywhere, so why should I miss it? The only time I miss anything is when I watch you on tape every morning over breakfast. You, frozen in onscreen stasis at thirty-six (at thirty-two, when I left you; at eighteen, when Sam did). You, forever trailing by four years and thousands of miles, never quite pulling off the rally; asking us, _Can I can come with you?_

Casey starts to hum. Dan cocks his head, but then recognition floods his face. He starts singing, low and sweet and beyond hurt, just as Casey's hum turns into words:

"…I'm not sleepy and there ain't no place I'm goin' to. Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me. In the jingle-jangle morning, I'll come followin' you."

When the verse ends, all that Casey can think to say is "I don't miss getting to watch my son grow up."

"I know," says Dan. "It's okay." And then: "You guys have to get going, right? Julia's waiting?"

"She kind of is," says Casey, starting to stand. "We should—"

"Yeah. Julia won't wait forever." Dan doesn't get up, so Casey has to come around the table to clap him companionably on the shoulder.

"We should do this again, man. Seriously."

Dan leans back against Casey's hand for a moment. Just the nape of his neck, the base of his skull: barely touching. Then he sits forward again and nods.

Casey yells to Charlie, and when he glances back at the table, Dan's got the Sprite bottle sitting between his elbows. He's unscrewing the cap. When it's off, he turns it over, sets it in the middle of his left palm, and regards it intently.

"You win?" asks Casey.

Dan just looks at it and smiles. Dan is always smiling. It's the first job he was ever given, and the hardest.

"No," he says. "Not yet."


End file.
